Thursday

Nov 8, 2018 at 12:01 AMNov 8, 2018 at 12:46 PM

As her 10th anniversary as the Terrie and Bradley Bloom Artistic Director of the American Repertory Theater at Harvard University approached, Diane Paulus had no trouble deciding how she wanted to mark it.

“I love to work in the musical theater form. So when I was thinking about what to direct for my 10th-anniversary season at the A.R.T., I knew I wanted to do a musical,” explained Paulus by telephone recently from Logan Airport, on her way to London to cast the West End premiere of “Waitress,” set to open in February.

“But it takes about three years to develop a new musical, and we’d just done ‘Jagged Little Pill’ this spring, so Diane Borger – executive director at the A.R.T. and my producing partner there – suggested we instead do a show celebrating a decade of musical theater at the A.R.T., and not just my productions, either.”

Not that an all-Paulus program would be paltry.

After all, since being named artistic director in May 2008, Paulus has directed 13 A.R.T. productions – four of which went on to Broadway, including two consecutive Tony Award winners for Best Revival of a Musical, “The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess” and “Pippin,” which also won her the 2013 Tony Award for Best Direction of a Musical – and two new musicals, “Finding Neverland” and “Waitress.”

Her 14th production, “ExtraOrdinary” – beginning Nov. 16 at the Loeb Drama Center – will highlight musical theater moments created by Paulus and others for the Cambridge theater company where more than 30 musicals and musical theater pieces have been staged in the last decade.

“I went back to the archives and I was completely overwhelmed by the list of what we’ve done. I did ‘Prometheus Bound,’ a rock musical by playwright Steven Sater and composer Serj Tankian, at Oberon in 2011.

“That had to come back now because it’s a story about a crazy tyranny, based on the Greek tragedy by Aeschylus. ‘This is the time of collusion,’ is one of the stories. To think that collusion is now in our everyday vernacular is really something,” said Paulus.

A cabaret retrospective, “ExtraOrdinary” will feature selections from that show as well as “The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess,” “Pippin,” “Waitress,” “Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812” and more.

That cast will be joined at each performance by a special guest, not announced in advance, also from past A.R.T. musicals.

“The core company and the roster of surprise special guests is thrilling. It’s a real cross-pollination of the shows. Everybody is very excited to be working together,” says Paulus, who has similar thoughts about of her creative team.

Paulus’s primary collaborator on “ExtraOrdinary” is its musical director, Lance Horne, who served in the same capacity on “Prometheus Bound” and “Cabaret” at the A.R.T. and is now pianist and music director for Alan Cumming.

“I’m very happy to be working with Lance again,” said Paulus. “We’ve put songs together thematically to create an event that looks behind the scenes. It’s going back to the roots of how these various shows were developed.”

The New York native has her own deep roots at Harvard. She earned her B.A. there in 1988, making this her 30th reunion year, and she remembers making many visits to the A.R.T.’s Loeb Drama Center as an undergraduate.

“I saw a lot of shows there, and second-acted even more. I even stole posters from some of them,” recalled Paulus with a laugh. “Even after 10 years, to think that I’m now running the A.R.T. is still a pinch-me moment every time.”

Had she stayed on her initial post-Harvard career path, things might be very different now for Paulus, who earned an MFA from Columbia University in 1997.

“When I left Harvard, I went back to New York to study acting with Mike Nichols at the New Actors Workshop. One day, we were going around the room sharing what each of us hoped to do in our careers.

“There were people there who wanted to act in films, on stage and in soap operas. And I said out loud, ‘I want to be Robert Brustein (A.R.T. founder and artistic director from 1980 to 2002) and run the A.R.T.’ I had just gotten my head shots, but I knew I wanted to do something other than acting,” said Paulus, who is also professor of the practice of theater at Harvard.

That eventually led Paulus to a career as an opera and theater director. Her first Broadway production, “Hair,” won the 2008 Tony Award for Best Revival of a Musical. (Paulus will co-direct “Hair Live!” set to air May 19, 2019, on NBC-TV.)

“I had been working a lot in opera and then I did ‘Hair’ just prior to joining the A.R.T. I knew the company had a history of doing both opera and boundary-breaking theater,” she says.

It was a groundbreaking opera, which had its original world premiere at Boston’s Colonial Theatre in 1935, that first showed Paulus the potential of her professional home.

“Our 2011 staging of ‘Porgy and Bess’ was transformative. It was the largest show we’d ever done and tens of thousands of people came to see it, many of whom had never been to the A.R.T. before. It reinforced our quest to expand the musical theater form and the audience.

“Musicals are a signature American art form and can be amazing, serious theater. It’s a great pleasure to invite artists, composers, and choreographers from other genres into the form,” says Paulus.

With that in mind, she has collaborated with Grammy Award winner Alanis Morissette and Academy Award winner Diablo Cody on “Jagged Little Pill,” Grammy Award winner Sara Bareilles on “Waitress,” and choreographer Gypsy Snider of the Montreal circus troupe Les 7 Doigts de la Main on “Pippin.”

Another Paulus collaborator is her husband, Randy Weiner, a playwright, producer, theater and nightclub owner, and fellow Harvard alum.

Weiner conceived “The Donkey Show” – a fixture at Oberon in Cambridge since 2009 – and co-directed it with Paulus. A disco adaptation of Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” the musical had a long off-Broadway run and has had several international productions.

The pair also collaborated on Cirque du Soleil’s Amaluna, which has been touring worldwide since 2012. Married for 23 years, they have two daughters, Natalie, 14, and Katharine, 11.

“My husband and my kids know me better than anyone. The kids are so smart. They’re empowered girls and they speak their minds, especially with Mom. That means that they’re often my biggest critics.

“They’ve earned that right, though, because they’ve sat through my shows so many times. They’re always around, which makes me very happy,” said the proud mother.

Paulus – currently represented on Broadway by “Waitress” and off-Broadway by the just-opened Emily Mann play “Gloria: A Life,” starring Christine Lahti as Gloria Steinem – also remains passionate about her profession.

“Ten years in, I feel more convinced than ever of the necessity of theater as a community. You come into a space with other people to identify with a story using all five senses.

“It’s what it means to be a functioning society. We need the transformative power of theater, and its democratic possibilities, now more than ever,” says Paulus.